Brendan Burns reviewed at Newbury Comedy Festival 2009
A sadly sparse attendance for the opening night of Newbury Comedy Festival saw the audience encouraged to move into the front row to see Brendan Burns. Foolishly we moved front and centre... and discovered no-one else did.
It wasn't going to be if he attacked, as much as when! It would be the second half after testing the water to see if we were suitable. After all, we had been crazy enough to sit at the front.
Three years sober from cocaine (accepting a gleeful leap from the wagon 12 months ago), Aussie-born Burns is now binge drinking energy drinks and burst forth spitting comic bile at an array of targets, and from our lonely vantage point in the front row we could feel that mocking venom.
Much like the caffeine fuelled energy drinks, this was never going to be for the faint of heart, and it did not take long before he was not so much mocking the weak as digging up the dead and ridiculing them Michael Jackson was a fair target he argued and he expressed his all consuming joy at the irony of Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin's death and performed an animal mafia sketch where a stingray volunteers to deal with the wildlife taunting celebrity.
He railed on Jade Goody and warned that her death through ignorance would actually perpetuate more ignorance through education. The NHS, he argued, was based on apathy. However Goody had led to more young women of her ilk to get tested for cervical cancer, more were surviving and they would have more chav children.
Riding roughshod over the wary laughter he argued that the stupid were the ones who wrote history. After all, only the daftest dinosaurs fell into tar pits and survive today as fossils!
Racism withered in his path and he concluded that you should not shorten the name of any racial group you had previously exploited, liberally illustrating the point.
Fuelled by Red Bull and the Australian energy drink Mother (you cannot help but think a second word goes unspoken) Burns rarely paused for breath, only occasionally being pensive as he prepared to unleash another tsunami of ridicule.
The can of Coca Cola-made Mother fuelled the final sketch too, as he read the typically Aussie mocking health and safety warning on the can after it supposedly killed people and unborn babies with its caffeinated evil, before morphing it repeatedly into a phallic symbol and spurting the contents worryingly close.
Our fear of being splashed by his ejaculate prompted unwise interaction which saw me mocked not only for being called Nigel, but he also ridiculed any notion that being a reviewer afforded me any protection. Only when Diane assured him I was a 'good bloke' and the emergence of another Nigel nearby, did he move on!
Distasteful? Without a doubt! Comedy genius? Probably not. However, what Burns does have is a remarkable charm and an ability to call the hypocrisy of the audience whenever it did hesitate to laugh.